Tag Archives: Jeremy Corbyn

As the dust settles on the General Election result, one thing is obvious: no one won an outright majority. The Tories lost their majority after their leader’s high stakes gamble in calling a snap general election, and Labour came second. Those facts are inescapable. But why call the election in the first place? The reason given by many political hacks was that, apparently, May took one look across the dispatch box and perceived a weak Jeremy Corbyn, and thought she could walk it by uttering a few idiotic soundbites. How wrong she was. She and her party thought the landslide was in the bag. How wrong they were. Remember, this was a landslide widely predicted by the great and the good of Britain’s media. Their oft-repeated prediction was intended to achieve one aim: to intimidate Labour supporters, and convince them to stay at home rather than vote for the unelectable Labour Party led by the unelectable Jeremy Corbyn (who’s actually won every election since 1983).

Since the election the complaint from the Tories and mainstream media has been “They’re behaving/pretending like they’ve won the election”! This complaint reveals an ignorance of how parliamentary politics and the constitution works. It also demonstrates a weak grasp of history, particularly of hung parliaments and minority governments, and the role of the opposition in a hung parliament. More importantly, the complaint itself is puerile and serves to further undermine our limited and deeply corrupted democracy. But it also underscores the Tory Party’s authoritarian tendencies: in other words, you can have an official opposition as long as it’s supine and scared of its own shadow. Thankfully, we don’t live in a Tory one-party state – yet.

I have already talked about two hung parliaments in December 1923 and February 1974, which resulted in hung parliaments and minority governments. It is clear that this latest hysterical outburst from the Tories and their media allies is designed to convince gullible members of the public that Labour is out to destroy the country by not playing ball with May’s apparently serious and adult government (sic), which is supposedly acting in “the national interest“.

Labour has the right to say that it is waiting and ready to form a government. Why? Because:

The role of the opposition in a hung parliament is to use every opportunity to defeat the government. You can guarantee that if the situation were reversed, no one in the media would say “They’re (the Tories) pretending they’ve won the election”. Instead, the media would actively encourage the Tories to find ways to defeat a Labour minority government as The Daily Mail – with the connivance of the secret state – did in 1924.

Labour is the second party and could form a minority government if the Queen’s Speech is defeated. That’s how the constitution works. This is what happened in January 1924 and February 1974.

It’s annoying to see even seasoned political commentators like Andrew Neil resorting to this kind of bullshit. He’s supposed to know how the constitution works. It’s his job. Mind you, he is a Tory after all.

This is the latest manifestation of an ongoing campaign to smear the Labour Party and, by extension, Jeremy Corbyn, because the previous smears failed. Indeed, the party did better than expected in spite of the tow year long smear campaign in much of the media. Unable to comprehend the election result, Tories and their media allies have misrepresented Labour’s rediscovered sense of confidence for arrogance, but it’s a projection. I mean, how dare they feel confident? They lost, didn’t they? Well, yes, but the Tories didn’t win either despite being the largest party and besides, it looks as though they’ve been caught cheatingagain.

Finally, the Tories are weak and they know it, so they lash out like wounded animals. In 1974, Ted Heath attempted to form a coalition with Jeremy Thorpe’s Liberal Party. The talks broke down over the weekend. May’s Tories are trying to form a confidence and supply arrangement with the Democratic Unionist Party and, by all accounts, it isn’t going very well. The DUP have accused the Tories of being poor negotiators. We’re also told that this deal has to happen because, according the the Tories and the media, the DUP “doesn’t want to see Corbyn as PM”. So what? We don’t want to see the Tories continue to drag Britain into the abyss, nor do we want to see the DUP pull May’s strings – she’s weak enough as it is.

The sooner this useless and cruel government is dispatched, the better.

After last night’s election losses that saw Theresa May’s Tory Party denied an overall majority in the Commons, it was perhaps inevitable that they would turn to the Democratic Unionist Party to prop them up. A reminder: this is not a coalition; it is an arrangement between the party of government and another party. There is no joint programme as there would be between two parties entering a coalition. It is a formal agreement between a smaller party and the larger party to support government policies on an issue by issue basis. The Lib Dems could have chosen this option but decided to opt for government instead. Perhaps fearing a future wipeout by the Ulster Unionist Party, who are the natural allies of the Tories, the DUP picked the least worse option. By the way, there are no UUP MPs in the Commons, so the only Unionist Party that May could turn to was the DUP, who, along with Independent Unionist, Sylvia Hermon, have supported the Tories in the Commons since 2015.

So what do we know about the DUP?

The DUP is a socially conservative political party in Northern Ireland. It was founded by Dr Ian Paisley and Desmond Boal in 1971 from the remains of the Protestant Unionist Party. It was, until recently, in a power-sharing government with their mortal enemies, Sinn Féin. During its time in government, the DUP has opposed equal marriage and abortion, and are climate change deniers. This will make a few socially liberal Tories feel rather uncomfortable. If you think the Tories are stuck in the 19th century, the DUP lives in the 17th century.

What else?

As I wrote in this article from 2015, the party has links to Loyalist paramilitaries like the Ulster Defence Association, the Ulster Volunteer Force and the Red Hand Commando. At times, the DUP has been referred to as “political wing of the UDA”.

Why does any of this matter?

Throughout the General Election campaign, the Tories and their allies in the media accused Jeremy Corbyn, John McDonnell and, to a lesser extent, Diane Abbott of being “IRA/terrorist sympathizers”. Their reasons for doing this were tenuous: Corbyn spoke to representatives of Sinn Féin, and not the IRA, in order to facilitate a peaceful end to the so-called ‘Troubles’. The Tories thought that by linking Corbyn et al to the IRA, they could claim he was “soft on terrorism” and put an end to his momentum. Now the Tories are in a working relationship with the DUP, whose links to Loyalist paramilitaries – terrorists, if you will – are well known. The Tories find themselves in a deliciously hypocritical position after spending much of the campaign smearing Corbyn for his “appeasement of Britain’s enemies”. The Tories can now be cast as ‘terrorist sympathizers’.

I went to bed at 4am this morning and woke up about four hours later. When I went to bed, it was clear that there was going to be a hung parliament. May gambled her government and her reputation (such as it is) and lost. Labour, on the other hand, did much better than expected. But just imagine what could have happened if the Blairites and the PLP plotters hadn’t spent so much time attacking their leader and membership, and had got fully behind Jeremy Corbyn. We could have been looking at a different scenario, one in which Labour won a decent majority.

As I type this, the Tories have 318 seats, which is well short of an outright majority. The Tories are also reported to be talking to the Democratic Unionist Party to come to some kind of arrangement. It is unlikely that the DUP will form a coalition with the Tories. However, the thought of the deeply reactionary DUP aligning themselves with the Tories isn’t a pleasant prospect. That said, such a government is unlikely to last more than 12 months without collapsing. Another General Election could be called as early as October.

Labour lost no seats and gained at the expense of the Tories and UKIP. They won Ipswich from Ben Gummer and took Canterbury from Julian Brazier. Canterbury was a formerly safe seat that had been in Tory hands since 1918. That’s quite an achievement. This morning all the naysayers and plotters are wiping a great deal of egg off their faces. Speaking of egg (or things that rhyme with egg), Nick Clegg, the former Deputy PM lost his Sheffield Hallam seat to Labour.

As I write this, the BBC’s pundits are in a spin. All their predictions of how Labour would suffer its heaviest loss since 1983 have been dashed. I knew this election was nothing like 1983 because the situation is vastly different. and the media’s hacks are still stuck in the 1980s. Now, after all these weeks, they’re talking about February 1974 and Heath’s disastrous gamble, which in some ways, is similar to May’s decision to call a snap election. I could have told them that. Indeed, I told The Guardian’s Michael White the same thing. He scoffed. I wonder what he’s saying this morning?

Other losers in this election are The S*n, the Daily Heil and The Daily Abscess, who spent a great deal of time and effort trying to undermine the democratic process. They must be held to account. We can no longer tolerate a newspaper industry that prints lies, distortions and smears. The BBC also needs to change. For the last several months they, like the rest of the media, have told us that the Tories would win “a landslide” and suggested, in not so many words, that there was no point in voting. How wrong they were.

UPDATE 9 June, 2017 @ 1248

UKIP leader, Paul Nuttall, has resigned.

Labour is poised to take Kensington. Yes, you read that correctly. Kensington.

No one can predict the future, so let’s put the notion that people can predict future events to bed straight away . Since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, I’ve had many people tell me that Labour will lose the [next] election badly and be consigned to electoral oblivion for a generation. I even had some Kipper tell me that Geert Wilders would become Dutch PM and Marine Le Pen would win the French Presidential Election. He added that he’d “been right in the past” because he “studied the polls”. Of course, neither Wilders nor Le Pen won their respective elections and as I told this Kipper, “If you’re so certain, then perhaps you can give me this week’s winning lottery numbers”. He declined. If I had the gift of second sight, I certainly wouldn’t be boring the pants off of people on comments threads with my tenuous claims of precognition. I’d be lounging about on my own Caribbean island and donating money to left-wing political parties.

When it comes to Labour’s chances of securing victory in next week’s General Election, the pundits have mostly been of one mind: it’s curtains for Labour. The Tories will win a landslide and that’s that. Even the Tories themselves have said, in not so many words, that they’re on course to achieve a manifold increase in their tiny majority. In City AM last September, QMU’s Professor Tim Bale offered us a slice of expert sagaciousness,

Unless everything we think we know about politics turns out to be wrong, the Tories are going to win the next election. They are way ahead of Labour on both economic competence and best Prime Minister. Just how big that win will be partly depends on when they go to the country. If Theresa May does what any normal politician would do in her position, she will engineer a contest in the spring or early summer of next year – before the compromises she’s going to have to make with Brussels become overly obvious, before the economy begins palpably to slow down, before the continuing squeeze on the NHS makes waiting lists and times even longer – and before Labour can dump Jeremy Corbyn. And even if she waits until 2020, she’ll still win. But if she goes sooner, she stands a chance of achieving the sort of majority that the Conservatives have only been able to dream about for 30 years. Carpe diem!

Bale obviously didn’t count on May’s less-than-engaging personality and her party’s weird mix of spite, control freakery and incompetence. Not to mention the cowardliness of May herself. Carpe Diem, indeed.

The supposedly Labour-supporting Daily Mirror claimed that Labour was “certain to lose the 2020 General Election. Their story was based on a Fabian Society report, which claimed the party will only hang on to around “140 seats”.

Last April, the Independent’s John Rentoul indulged himself in an extraordinary masturbatory fantasy in which Bozza is now PM and Heidi Alexander is now Labour leader (I know, I know),

Heidi Alexander, had fought the hopeless fight. Indeed, since she had defeated Jeremy Corbyn six months ago, in the fourth Labour leadership election in four years, she had showed great skill in neither fully renouncing nor standing by her predecessor’s programme.

Jesus, that’s terrible.

Even G*d-bothering Liberal Democrat leader, Tim Farron, keeps telling us that the Tories will win a landslide. Dim Tim told The Guardian “The worst governments are the ones with the weakest oppositions. The Liberal Democrats are in a very strong position now to fill that space.” Are those are the same Liberal Democrats that slipped between the sheets with the Tories in 2010 and helped to implement some of the most savage cuts to public services for a generation? I’ll take no lessons from you, Tim. Thanks, but no thanks.

If the general election result is such an outright certainty, then why bother having an election in the first place? Why not just have a lavish coronation ceremony for Theresa May instead? I mean, what is the point in this supposedly pointless democratic exercise if the Tories are certain to win a landslide? Let’s just get the coup out of the way and then we can move on – if that’s what you Tories and media pundits want, of course. Because let’s face it, when the Tories and the Lib Dems talk about the need for a ‘strong opposition’ what they really mean by ‘strong’ is antonymous; it’s the authoritarian’s definition of a strong opposition. The last thing the Tories want is a Labour party that stands up to them, hence their resort to personalizations and smears. Does that sound like a party that’s confident of its impending electoral success?

So here’s an appeal to the media pundits and self-imagined political soothsayers, please don’t give up the day jobs. You don’t have magic powers that allow you to predict the future. You’re hacks, who just happen to be a little too close to political power to be truly objective. Your special insight, such as it is, is limited to the tiny world you inhabit. You speak for no one but yourselves and your masters. If you want to predict the future, get yourselves a seaside stall, a pack of tarot cards, a crystal ball and a black obsidian mirror. No one’s stopping you.

Nothing in life or politics is certain. But one thing is true: the Tories have run a terrible campaign and Labour has performed better than the media expected. On that basis, it seems reasonable to suggest that the Tories won’t do as well as the pundits have predicted.

I love this story. Tomorrow, the Kop will unveil a massive banner of Jeremy Corbyn. Yesterday, the BBC’s Six O’Clock News told us that support for Corbyn’s Labour Party was “crumbling” in the newly-created Liverpool City Region. I kid you not.

Come on, you Blues and Whites (Tranmere), let’s see yours!

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn may have had a tricky week – but he is set to play a starring role atAnfield tomorrow.

A special banner will be unveiled on the Kop for the Reds’ lunchtime clash with Southampton in recognition of Labour’s success in this week’s Liverpool Metro Mayor election.

The banner depicts the Labour leader as well as his shadow chancellor John McDonnell and also shows support for the Hillsborough Justice Campaign.

In a message to Labour supporters and working class voters to get behind the party, the flag includes the slogan: “What unites us is greater than what divides us”.

Many of you will know the phrase ‘The victors write history’, some of you may know Marx’s famous line from The 18th Brumaire of Louis Napoleon. “History repeats itself, first as tragedy, second as farce”. We live at a period in time in which lies have become the new truth and history itself is being rewritten before our very eyes. The revised version of history, which has been constructed to serve the interests of Britain’s socio-economic orthodoxy, is simultaneously tragic and farcical. Tragic because the historical revisionism that we now find ourselves watching can only end badly. Farcical, because the historical claims made by commentators, politicians and armchair pundits are easily challenged if you make the effort.

Yesterday as I was watching the impartial coverage of the local election results on the BBC, I noticed how commentators and politicians alike kept referring to the 1980s. Indeed, since Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party, the media can’t help but refer to the Eighties. Peter Kellner of YouGov, for example, reminded John McDonnell that Labour’s losses, in what are traditionally Tory heartlands, was reminiscent (for him and those like him) of the Local and General Elections of 1983.

Naturally, Kellner couldn’t resist summoning up the ghost of the much maligned Michael Foot. But McDonnell snapped back that perhaps 1974 was a better reference point than 1983. Kellner grudgingly conceded but appeared to stick to his original position. So what is this obsession with the 1980s? Well, as someone who lived through that decade, I can tell you that the public memory of that decade is faulty both in terms of history and the wilful mischaracterization of Foot as some radical left-winger. This is a recent historical revision of the 1980s and it must be challenged.

In this previous blog, I pointed out that May’s calling of a snap election was actually more redolent of 1974 and Edward Heath’s “Who Governs Britain?” and not the 1980s. The Tories and, seemingly, the media would rather you didn’t remember what happened in 1974. They would prefer that you remembered the decade’s specially selected highlights: the power cuts, the three day week and the mythical ‘Winter of Discontent’ (coined by The S*n).

So why don’t they want you to know what actually happened in the 1970s? Is it because Heath’s government was pretty inept but also hellbent on smashing the trade unions? Maybe it’s because the Tories and their allies in the media imagine that history only began when Thatcher was elected in May 1979? Are we now living in the Year 38AT (After Thatcher) instead of the (much contested) 2017AD/2017CE?

Many people forget that it was the Heath government, not Wilson or Callaghan, that introduced Value Added Tax and abolished free school milk (overseen by Thatcher). A few weeks ago I had to correct someone when they claimed the three day week took place under Labour. They even had the gall to conflate it with the ‘Winter of Discontent’. Where do historical revisionisms like this come from? Who is responsible for producing these lies? It is possible that the media’s opinion formers play their part with the collusion of politicians – especially Tories and right-wing Labour MPs who join in with their game – in the production of these warped narratives? Of course, it is. You only have to look no further than the likes of Hilary Benn and his license with Spanish Civil War history to see it in action.

Since the 1980s, a cult has grown up around the personality of Thatcher and this cult replaced the earlier cult of Churchill. For these cultists, what Thatcher represented is more important than either her personality or her ‘achievements’. She was either ‘The Iron Lady’, ‘The Saviour of the Nation’. Theresa May might have poured herself into Thatcher’s power suits but it’s a bad fit. Thatcher, for her part, was a Churchill cultist (she also belonged to the Powell cult) and channelled his spirit during the Miners’ Strike and her final days in power. It helped to finish her off.

Adam Curtis’s series The Living Dead examines the way in which politicians will use history to suit their objectives – with disastrous consequences. Below is an episode from the series, titled ‘The Attic’, which looks at Thatcher’s adoption of the Churchillian mantle as a means to appear tough and in control.

History is a contested space in which each of us writes our histories every day. We write about our own lives and our interactions with others when we tell colleagues and acquaintances what we did yesterday or the day before. The word ‘write’ is important here: the French word for story is histoire, which also happens to be the same word for ‘history’. That tells us that history is a narrative and is subject to, and a product of, an individual’s or a group’s ideology. Events on their own don’t make history, they need a backstory to make sense. If you can add some lies, then you have a full blown propagandized narrative that blinds people to the truth about their own pasts.

So what about Michael Foot? Wasn’t he some crazed hard left loon? Well, no he wasn’t. He was considered rather soft left; a ‘safe pair of hands’; the compromise candidate. Sure he was a member of CND and a unilateralist, but they were pretty common in the Labour Party in the days before the Thatcher’s cultural Year Zero (0AT).

So, whatever anyone tells you: this is not 1983, 1987 or even 1974. The year is 2017 and future cannot be divined by poring over past events and summoning up their spirits. If you want your fortune told, there are plenty of seaside mystics and other ‘scryers’ out there who will take your money. But don’t waste my time with your cod second sight baloney.

Forgive me in advance, but the cynic in me thinks that Theresa May calling for a debate to acquire the two thirds majority needed under the terms of the Fixed Term Parliament Act (FTPA), which will allow her to call a General Election, is not only cynical but desperate. This morning, I heard rumours that the Crown Prosecution Service is to make an announcement that 22 Conservative MPs are to face prosecution for failing to correctly declare their election expenses in 2015. Naturally, the BBC’s political geniuses and self-styled gurus failed to mention this as a possible factor in May’s decision. Indeed, in March, the Prime Minister ruled out calling a snap General Election. Here she is being interviewed by Andrew Neil on The Sunday Politics. At round 28.00 she appears to quash rumours that she will call a snap election.

When the ‘Downing Street’ announcement was made at a few minutes past eleven this morning, the Blairites, Blue Labourites, assorted anti-Corbynites and their ever-diminishing band of supporters were gleefully claiming that the end is nigh for Jeremy Corbyn’s time as party leader. In what other country would you have people, who are supposedly members of a particular political party, wishing for their own party’s demise? What kind of false consciousness bullshit is that?

If May is successful in securing a two thirds majority to trigger the election, the usual voices will claim that Corbyn should have voted against it. But then, these people are utterly clueless about Parliamentary procedure and party politics generally. Parliament, if anything, is all about procedure, which involves the kind of dull and often repetitive stuff that turns many people off politics.. well, party politics at any rate. Real politics concerns the decisions and choices you make in your everyday lives. Parliamentary politics, as currently configured, is entertainment, public relations and a lot of bullshit. The FTPA demands that either a vote of no confidence is tabled or the PM seeks the approval of the Commons to call an election.

One last thing: members are important and a party that has hundreds of thousands of members is likely to do better than a party with a fraction of those members. No political party with a handful of members has ever made an electoral impact, formed a government nor formed the official opposition. I’ll be watching the Blairites to see how they behave. My instincts tell me that they will actively try to sabotage their party’s chances of winning. Let’s hope my instincts are wrong.

UPDATE 18/4/17 @ 1742

According to Michael Crick, the CPS deadline for the decision on whether to prosecute 22 Tory MPs is late May or early June.

UPDATE 18/4/17 @ 2011

Channel 4 News has reported that there are over 30 Tory MPs and election agents that are facing prosecution.